Right to the heart of Stalin's USSR

History:On March 6th, 1953, Soviet radio broadcast a statement from the Central Committee of the Communist Party. It began: "The heart of Stalin - comrade and inspired follower of Lenin's will, the wise leader and teacher of the Communist Party and the Soviet people - has ceased to beat."

By the time the broadcast had ended the streets of Moscow were thronged with citizens expressing hysterical grief.

Even those to emerge in later life with strongly anti-Stalinist views were moved to tears. One of them, in a letter written at the time, declared: "I am under the influence of a great man's death. I am thinking of his humanity." The writer was Andrei Sakharov, later to become a Nobel Prize winner, peace campaigner and indefatigable human rights activist.

Sakharov's reaction was a dramatic example of the hold Stalin had over his people despite having held them in terror and being responsible for the deaths of a significant percentage of the USSR's population. The "cult of the personality" may have explained part of this phenomenon - Stalin was praised in the media almost to the point of deification - but there may have been a lot more to it than that.

In the second World War, Soviet soldiers went into battle with the words "Za Rodinu, Za Stalina" on their lips. At the Tehran Conference in 1943 Winston Churchill, in a nauseating act of sycophancy, presented Stalin with the bejewelled Sword of Stalingrad "in token of the homage of the British people". Churchill's mastery of the English language is unquestioned, so his use of the word "homage", with all its connotations of the feudal relationship between a vassal and his lord, indicated not a gesture of gratitude but one of obeisance.

How did Stalin, therefore, hold so many people in his thrall? Roberts, like many other historians, points out Stalin's disastrous purge of the officer corps immediately prior to the war as weakening the USSR's ability to defend itself against the Nazi attack in 1941. Unlike many others, however, he maintains that Stalin learned quickly from his mistakes and he produces a mass of evidence from Russian archives to back this up.

There is a popular view of Stalin's record in the second World War that portrays him as a paranoid maniac who almost destroyed his country only to be saved from defeat by the Russian winter. The US ambassador in the Soviet Union for most of the war, Averell Harriman, took a different view: "I'd like to emphasise my great admiration for Stalin, the national leader in an emergency - one of those historical occasions when one man made such a difference. This in no sense minimises my revulsion against his cruelties; but I have to give you the constructive side as well as the other."

In short, the Soviet people regarded Stalin as the man who won the war. He was their hero and, for a brief time in the West, he was "Uncle Joe" - a friend and ally.

Despite all this, it is impossible to keep the memory of Stalin's excesses from coming to the forefront of one's mind even when reading a book that deliberately concentrates on what Harriman called the "constructive side". Why did Stalin behave in such a monstrous fashion? The question crops up repeatedly when reading Stalin's Wars. References to Stalin's character are frequent and enlightening. He was charming when he wanted to be. At times he was a bully and at other times a man with a disarming sense of humour. But was he paranoid? Paranoia has been frequently put forward as a reason from his monstrous behaviour.

The Great Terror, for example, was directed at his comrades in the Communist Party, and turning against those close to you can be a classic symptom of paranoia. The Russian anecdote of the three men talking in the Gulag about the reasons for their imprisonment gives a flavour of a time when no view was a safe one: "I am here because I supported Bukharin said the first. I am here because I opposed Bukharin said the second. I am here, said the third, because I am Bukharin."

Roberts does not, however, subscribe to the paranoia theory. There may have been, he writes, an element of paranoia in Stalin's behaviour, but the key to his motivations lay "in the realm of ideology". He was devoted to the class struggle and saw it as a "struggle waged between states as well as within states". His ability to learn quickly from his mistakes, his capacity to absorb detail as well as to see the broad picture, and his ruthless determination to achieve victory, brought success in the first of Stalin's "wars". The second of those conflicts, the Cold War, was won by the West, but that victory occurred long after Stalin's heart had ceased to beat.

His attitudes to his former allies during that period appear dominated by his disappointment at their refusal, in his mind, to recognise the Soviet Union's right to the spoils of war. Those who were his friends when they needed him became his enemies as soon as the conflict ended, not least Churchill, whose lickspittle performance at Tehran was obliterated by his "Iron Curtain" speech at Fulton, Missouri, three years later.

A large number of Stalin's foreign policy decisions in the last eight years of his life are shown to be influenced by this sense of betrayal as well as his absolute determination to achieve his own targets for the USSR. Stalin's Wars is a commendable and comprehensive work on neglected aspects of Soviet history and is all the rarer for coming from a scholarly source in Ireland.

Séamus Martin is a former Moscow correspondent and international editor of The Irish Times

Stalin's Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939-1953 By Geoffrey Roberts Yale University Press, 468pp. €34